When Yma first approached me to do a dance film I didn’t even know what a beautiful and professional dancer she was. As soon as she sent me Pascale Darchy and Neil Robinson’s dark, intense piece Grotte I was straight away captured by the haunting sound. It was going to be my very first dance movement piece. We chose this industrial lift to do the filming as we thought it reflected perfectly the inner experience that we both felt listening the score: that cave feeling.

We managed to film in one day with two cameras: one Sony HDR - XR520 for wide-angle that Cristina was operating and me with Canon7D for close-ups. I wanted to capture the intensity of Yma’s graceful movements. The piece became personal to us both reflecting our own grief at times and other times our own inner struggles.

We have the first version as a raw piece, unedited, one single take here:

This edit took me a while to compose as I had to go back all the takes and produce something that would be faithful to both of our experience. My editing choices mostly intuitive I didn’t have the clear explanations but what came out felt right. I hope I did justice to the piece.

I thank you to Yma for giving me this opportunity, to Cristina helping me with the second camera and musicians Pascale Darchy and Neil Robinson for their incredible score.
It’s been wonderful to work with Yma and we’re about to do another piece together. So hold your horses! And thank you for watching.
ZD

And a great review by Gerard Davis: dancingreview.wordpress.com/2015/08/10/dance-film-zeynep-dagli-experience-dans-une-grotte/
Thank you so much, Gerard.